"Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald, is preparing to issue a full pardon to a man sent to the gallows almost 75 years ago for a murder he did not commit. Harry Gleeson from Co Tipperary is to become the first recipient of a posthumous pardon from the State once the move is approved by Cabinet in the weeks ahead. In April 1941 Mr Gleeson was convicted of the murder of Mary McCarthy, known as Moll Carthy. He had found her body lying in a field on the New Inn farm he managed on November 22nd, 1940. Huge doubts have long hung over his conviction and subsequent execution but his innocence is to be finally recognised thanks in no small part to the Griffith College-based Irish Innocence Project and the Justice for Harry Gleeson group......... The Department of Justice had received a submission on the case last year, claiming several threads of new evidence. Much of this evidence had been compiled by the Justice for Harry Gleeson Group which subsequently contacted the Innocence Project. The case review found that the prosecution had successfully withheld crucial information highlighting discrepancies in their case (in particular relating to the registration of the firearm); that gardaí encouraged witnesses to submit falsified statements and that gardaí beat a witness during questioning. Forensic evidence from a US pathologist also proved Mr Gleeson had an alibi."
See the Innocence Project's account of the steps taken to secure Harry Gleason's full pardon - 75 years after his execution: "In the summer of 2012, the Justice for Harry Gleeson Group approached the Irish Innocence Project with a set of documents, including trial transcripts and newspaper clippings, which they believed proved the man’s innocence. For
years, the group had worked to clear to Co Tipperary man’s name,
decades after he was convicted of murdering unmarried mother of seven
Mary “Moll” McCarthy. Gleeson (38) found her body in field on his
uncle’s farm at New Inn in November 1940. She had been shot in the face.
Less than six months later, he was hanged. Barrister David Langwallner,
founder and director of the Irish Innocence Project, which is based at
Griffith College in Dublin, was unsure at first. “I had to persuade the
project to take the case,” he says. “The project usually takes live
cases, and this was a dead case.”......... Langwallner
and Tertius Van Eeden, a former law student at Griffith who has since
graduated, took on Gleeson’s case. “I was lucky to be the lead and only
caseworker on the Gleeson case under David’s supervision,” says Van
Eeden, a former chef who is originally from South Africa. “I started
reading reams and reams of the trial transcripts and came across
specific times where the judge asked for the gun register [which
recorded ammunition purchases] and the prosecution never showed it to
him.” The Justice for Harry Gleeson Group
had found this register and given it to the project. If produced at
trial, it would have undermined the prosecution’s case that Gleeson used
a certain type of bullet to kill McCarthy. The book recorded the
purchase of a type of bullet different from those found near the body. Langwallner
says the book would have been hugely significant from a defence
lawyer’s point of view. “If you were aware of that, you would have
gotten the case quashed at trial.” Another piece
of evidence that stood out was the victim’s body temperature, which was
recorded as 35.5 degrees Celsius five hours after Gleeson found it. “The
State’s case was that he killed her the day before and left her in the
field overnight,” Van Eeden says. “They said the body was lying in the
field for more than 15 hours in freezing temperatures.” However the body’s warmth undermined that claim, Van Eeden adds, noting the general forecast by Met Éireann
that day was “pretty grim”. “There was no way this body temperature
could have been recorded unless she was murdered in the morning and
dumped there,” he says. The team contacted Massachusetts-based forensic pathologist Dr Peter Cummings to review the postmortem. Dr Cummings took part in the 2013 documentary Cold Case JFK, in which he examined the former president’s postmortem photographs and clothing. “He was able to establish a time of death that supported Harry Gleeson’s alibi,” according to Anne Driscoll, who joined the Irish Innocence Project in 2013 as a Fulbright scholar. A US journalist who has written for the Boston Globe and the New York Times, she is now the project manager. The project compiled its evidence and submitted the case for a posthumous pardon to the Department of Justice in 2013."
